Last weekend, Ben Carson’s Department of Housing and Urban Development filed suit against Facebook, claiming that its methods of segregating consumers for advertisers constituted redlining, violating Civil Rights legislation. The battle between Big Data and civil rights has thus begun, rather earlier than had been expected. It is just one of the forces that will ensure that the 2020s will be the decade of the FAANGs’ eclipse, not of their final triumph.
Carson’s HUD suit looks to have considerable merit. Facebook, in its literature to advertisers, advertises the ability to display housing ads to either men or women alone, not to show Facebook ads to readers searching for “assistance dog,” “mobility scooter” “accessibility” or “deaf culture,” not to show ads to people interested in “child care” or “parenting”, and to red-line particular zip codes.
Each of those categories would seem to offend the central principles of civil rights. You may wish you could discriminate on the basis of race, sex, handicap or geographic location when selling goods and in particular housing, but legally, you can’t. Enabling the ability to block certain groups of consumers from ever seeing specific housing advertisements seems likely to fall under the same prohibition. We’ll see what a judge has to say in the HUD case, but it looks very likely that the central business model for the gigantic advertising sales of both Facebook and probably Alphabet is in deep trouble.
The potential civil rights violation is a serious problem for Facebook and, if it has the same problem, for Alphabet/Google. It is little use proclaiming that your corporate motto is “Don’t be evil” if you then provide facilities for your advertisers to segregate consumers as if they were Bull Connor, hoses, police attack dogs and all. I said in 2004 that Google’s “Don’t be Evil” moral preening was a pretty good indication that the company would, in fact, end up committing several different varieties of evil, and this is just one of them. Another may be its return to China, where it appears to be abandoning the principled stand it took in 2010 and falling in with the Chinese government’s demand for heavy censorship of search.
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